The last few days we've had a Minecraft mini conference with the new Minecraft developers @Dinnerbone, @_grum, @tahgtahv and @EvilSeph (old bukkit members) and Mojang's biz and web teams. We've discussed our short and long-term plans for Minecraft, which includes stuff such as the modding API and making it easier to start servers to play with your friends and family on.

The last few days we've had a Minecraft mini conference with the new Minecraft developers @Dinnerbone, @_grum, @tahgtahv and @EvilSeph (old bukkit members) and Mojang's biz and web teams. We've discussed our short and long-term plans for Minecraft, which includes stuff such as the modding API and making it easier to start servers to play with your friends and family on.

The modding API will be designed and developed openly, to make sure we get important feedback from members of the community. It will obviously be inspired by the team's experience from CraftBukkit, but will be created from scratch to avoid unnecessary dependencies on things that may not have been optimal in the past.

We've also prepared to be a larger team spread over several time zones, so we've moved to using git instead of svn, started using a task and story tracker, and configured a build project using Maven and Gradle. This is just a lot of developer mumbo-jumbo, but what I'm trying to say is that we are doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes.

Among the weekly tasks we've discussed whether we need to do a Minecraft 1.2.5 patch, or resume “snapshotting.” Unfortunately the 1.2.4 patch included a severe crash bug in the world generator, so we feel it's necessary to officially patch the game again. We are aware that many of you use modded clients or play on the bukkit server implementation, and that patches causes a lot of overhead for you. Neither are officially supported of course, but it's not in our interest to make it hard for people to play the game. The best compromise we could come up with was to make a pre-release of 1.2.5 today, and then update the game “for real” a few days later. This will give both modders and bukkit a few days to prepare for the release.

Changes:
-Added shift clicking support in furnaces
-Added method to easily acquire blocks you have selected in the world in Creative mode using the "pick block" key
-Made the Direct Connect dialogue remember the last IP for the current session
-Fixed issues detected certain links in chat
-Fixed wild ocelots behaving like tamed cats
-Fixed various chat crashes
-Made cats less eager to sit on things
-Made cats less patient
-Fixed world generation failing under certain circumstances
-Fixed issues turning off sound under certain circumstances
-Removed all ghost entities under the command of Lord Herobrine
-Fixed crash when pasting certain characters in chat
-Fixed slash ‘/’ key not behaving correctly in certain environments
-Fixed command matching being too greedy (for example: typing "/stophammertime" no longer stops your server)
-Fixed not being able to click coloured links
-Fixed potential issue with village door detection (which could cause too many villagers)
-Made using a stack of bowls on Mooshrooms not consume the whole stack of bowls
-Made punching a TNT block with flint and steel in hand destroy and drop a TNT block (right-clicking will activate the TNT)

The exact same version will be added to the launcher on Wednesday April 4, at 15:00 CEST (06:00 in California, 09:00 in Florida, 22:00 in Korea, and 23:00 in Sydney).